A natural disaster is never a good thing. Not only do they, in some cases, cause unheard of amounts of destruction but they make it very hard for their victims to carry about life as usual. As you’ll undoubtedly know, there has been a string of natural disasters happening all around the world such as hurricanes, tsunamis, earthquakes and floods. Life has been lost, property has been demolished and businesses have been forced to board up their doors.

One unfortunate example of this is Nikon. If you’ve recently been searching for a Nikon camera, lens or any other DSLR related part and have been unable to find it, you’re not alone. For those who aren’t aware, following the recently flooding in Thailand, one of Nikon’s major manufacturing plants was subject to quite a bit of damage. This forced the company to shut the plant’s doors in an effort to quickly clean up the mess.

Ever since the flooding, Nikon has been very good at keeping the public updated on what is going on but have withheld an exact date of when they hope to have the plant up and running at full speed, until now. Earlier this month the company issued a statement that let us know DSLR shipments are back on along with limited production. However, they don’t expect the plant to be back to 100% production until March 2012.

While this is a bummer for pretty much everyone involved from Nikon employees to the average consumer it is a great thing to know such speedy progress is being made. Let’s hope they are able to remedy this disaster even faster than planned.